Almost the very moment Ningning heard the screams from ahead, Baiye's ears too caught the faint sound of human voices.
Faint though it was, that sound was laced with a shrill, eardrum-piercing anguish that set Baiye on edge.
Something had gone wrong.
Having judged that the party ahead had most likely run into a crisis, Baiye could no longer worry about staying hidden, and broke into a run.
After tearing through a mere few dozen paces, the tunnel before Baiye suddenly opened wide—
An enormous natural cavern, as if the mountain's belly had been hollowed out, loomed grandly before her.
From the roughly ten-meter-high ceiling hung countless stalactites glowing a ghostly, sickly white, like rows of upside-down fangs, and threaded among them were strands of slime-dripping spider silk that sent a chill down one's spine.
And coiled in the center of this eerie cavern was a colossal thing the size of a small castle.
A giant spider-monster, its whole body flickering with purple light.
Its bulk nearly filled the greater part of the cavern, its eight long legs, sheathed in steel-needle black bristles, like so many great pillars driven deep into the ground.
Its carapace was a dark purple, dim as nightfall, blanketed with nauseating, seemingly natural streaks of ghastly white, like so many twisted, weeping faces.
Most terrifying of all was its head — eight compound eyes like burning crimson lanterns, locked fast onto the lambs waiting for slaughter below.
The pair of pedipalps protruding from its mouthparts, thicker than a grown man's waist, opened and closed in excitement, grinding together with a teeth-aching screech.
The adventurer party that had entered the cavern ahead of them was, by now, dead or wounded, every one.
The three men, so arrogant and unbridled a moment ago, had all died at the giant spider's hands in the space of an instant.
One had been stuck full of the bristles on the spider's legs like a hedgehog; one had been bound fast in silk and suffocated.
The last had already been torn in two, and now stared with a pair of blood-red eyes he hadn't managed to close, watching his own corpse be delivered into the spider's mouth.
And the frail little White Mage girl was at this moment bound tight in spider silk beneath the spider's head, saved for the next course.
"...Too late after all, then."
Baiye murmured to herself, then drew a pair of short blades from her waist.
Just as she made to leap forward, a panting complaint came from behind her:
"Baiye! Baiye, slow down, I can't keep up..."
Baiye didn't turn to look at the gasping, weak-kneed Ningning, and spoke at top speed:
"It's already too late. Stay here. I'll go save her."
Ningning took only a single glance, and the situation was immediately clear to her.
So without a word, she raised a hand, pointed at Baiye before her, and began madly stacking buffs onto her:
"Sticky Immunity! Swift Step! Presence Concealment! Metalcleaver!"
Baiye gripped her twin blades, felt the enhancing effects of the support magic, and instantly leapt forward:
"Thanks!"
"Wait, there's still a dozen more buffs to go! Come back!"
Baiye paid no heed to Ningning's shout and only sped up further.
Come back?
With that many support spells, by the time they were all stacked the whole thing would be stone cold.
Baiye's figure vanished from the entrance in a flash, so fast she left only a streak of black light, tumbling and weaving up and down through the cavern like lightning.
With every leap, Baiye let her toes land with pinpoint accuracy on strands of sticky spider silk of varying thickness strung between the walls.
With Sticky Immunity cast on her, not only did Baiye's feet fail to stick, the silk instead snapped taut like a bowstring, launching her back the other way at even greater speed.
The Baiye of this moment was a black bullet ricocheting endlessly through the intricate three-dimensional web, madly building kinetic energy.
The giant spider hadn't even had time to fully aim its mouthparts at the "dish" bound beneath its head when Baiye came shooting out of the shadows to its left, flying straight for its long legs!
In this dim cavern, a snow-white chill glittered along Baiye's twin blades.
That was the sign of Metalcleaver's magic gathering on her edges.
The first strike: into the seam of carapace where the spider's left foreleg joined its trunk.
"Shk—!"
A light sound, and the pale-gold blade-light sank into the spider's body without resistance, like a hot knife into a slab of half-melted butter.
The spider's massive body lurched in answer.
It hadn't even felt pain, only that one of its legs had suddenly lost the strength to support its body.
But this was only the beginning.
Baiye didn't pause for even an instant.
Riding the recoil of the strike, her figure rebounded at an eerie arc diagonally upward, spun cleanly off the cavern ceiling, dropped again, blades crossed—
The second strike, the third strike, landing with precision on the joints of two adjacent legs.
"Shk! Shk!"
Two thick, jointed limbs snapped off in answer, their cut faces smooth as mirrors. Purple-black fluid welled along the severed feet, as if they hadn't yet realized they'd been cut away.
But Baiye's figure had long since rebounded again.
She wove between the giant spider's limbs, her trajectory impossible to predict. Every ricochet, every change of direction, came paired with one, sometimes several, lethal streaks of pale-gold blade-light.
The fourth strike: four right-side walking legs severed in one breath.
The fifth and sixth strikes: two chelicerae shorn away.
The seventh through twelfth strikes: along the spider's relatively fragile thorax-abdomen joint, she opened a horrific gash that wrapped half its body, deep enough to reach the organs.
Baiye grew faster and faster, her blade-light denser and denser, weaving a golden net of death through the cavern.
Only now did the giant spider realize it was under attack.
But its massive body had long since lost the support of too many legs, and it crashed down with a roar, purple-black fluid gushing like a spring from its countless wounds, staining the web beneath it into a filthy sprawl.
An assassin's code of battle: cut the enemy down utterly before it can even react!
The final strike.
Baiye's figure appeared like a phantom directly above the spider's head as it reared up in agony.
She gripped both blades in a reverse hold, points aimed down, her body perpendicular to the ground, like a black meteor, carrying all the terrible kinetic energy amassed from every ricochet before, plunging straight down toward the spider's head.
"Shhng—!!!"
Baiye's twin blades sank to the hilt into the center of the spider's head, skewering that cluster of crimson compound eyes.
This giant spider, which had lorded over this place for years, was carved alive into sashimi without a single chance to resist.
"BOOOM—!!!"
The giant spider's heavy body slammed into the ground, kicking up a sky's worth of dust.
Eight severed legs sprawled all around in twisted poses.
The stalactites hanging from the cavern ceiling trembled, teetering as if about to fall.
"Hold on, that was only a few seconds..."
Gazing at the dungeon boss that had come apart and died in an instant before her eyes, Ningning gaped, dumbstruck, taking a good while to recover, and could only give a wry laugh.
She'd been worried Baiye couldn't take it alone.
The facts had proven her concern entirely superfluous.
By Ningning's estimate, from the moment Baiye charged into the cavern to the moment this colossal thing became a floor's worth of wreckage, the whole process had taken less than ten seconds.
Wasn't Baiye's combat power just a touch too overpowered?
So the rest of the party really were dragging her down after all, huh?